Towards Understanding of the Practice of Proclamation: The Core Element of Russian Baptist Worship, Timofey Cheprasov, 2015

’* Therefore, the role of the Scripture is matter of indifference or, worse still, law reduced to some historical value, allowing its readers to find out about Jesus and His death and resurrection, and, possibly, to discover what people need “to be saved.” Moreover, because the prescription of how to be saved and other important doctrines cannot be easily distilled, or because it can be discovered only by an educated minister who can then teach and preach them to the “flock/congregation,” then, even though highly respected or worshipped, the Bible loses its real transformational power. Obviously, there is no reason to read something one either doesn’t understand or cannot apply. Thus, the Scripture becomes effectively removed from the congregational life, and is only occasionally referred to (in Sunday worship services). Nevertheless, In spite of all the possible extremes that Baptists can slip into, baptistic biblicism turns from “worshipping the book” to being people, who live by this Book. The whole of life has to be affected by it. The Bible becomes the book, where they discover the way to live as a community of believers. It is not a book about ‘how to be “© Wright, Free Church, p 2. 149 saved,’”° but a book of life. This book is written for the church to follow, truly functioning ‘as a congregational textbook, source of sermons, classroom handbook, devotional guide, practical norm.” Such a baptistic vision serves as a hermeneutical tool that encourages reading the Bible not as a distant historical account, but as something people could relate to their lives. A brief summary might be required at this stage. The starting point of this chapter was the question of baptistic identity. Is there something that different people who are called by different names all over the globe hold in common, something that is sufficient enough to put them into one ecclesial type, into one group called “Baptists”? It is not a set of doctrines, as most of these free churches or unions of churches do not have (or do not share) confessions of faith. Neither is it a list of some hall-marks, or major convictions that they share (at least partially). Since none of these ways of defining baptistic identity proved to be helpful for this work, another approach is needed. It should be one organising principle, one vision that could serve as a guiding stimulus, a source of all major distinctiveness and commonalities. In my search, | have used a story showing how a biblical narrative was used by a particular community in difficult circumstances. This brought me to the supposition that the hermeneutics employed by these communities is the key element. In my next step, | would like to turn to the ideas developed by James McClendon, as they have been most helpful for this part of my project. 6.3 The baptist vision and the theological method of James Wm. McClendon Jr. The previous section ended with a su